Creating from Nothing — Reflections on the Landmark Forum
Get to nothing. Create from nothing. Act with integrity.
When people ask you about the Landmark Forum, I was told: Don’t summarize the content. Just explain what you got out of it.
What I got was three things:
Seeing myself objectively, including some painful insights into my pretenses and lack of integrity
Getting to nothing — seeing that my personal identity was based largely on arbitrary interpretations of past events
Creating from nothing by speaking about new possibilities and then aligning my moment-to-moment behavior with my speaking
Oddly enough, I also overcame my fear of public speaking enough to stand in front of the group several times and share some embarrassing personal experiences.
This fact still amazes me. It reflects Forum-inspired insights into a) my near-constant fear of what other people think about me and b) how limiting that is. During the Forum I somehow became willing to let all that go and risk full self-expression.
This alone was liberating and worth the enrollment fee.
Seeing myself objectively (Gosh, I’m a jerk)
To distill the essence of any teaching, start with the diagnosis: How does it describe our fundamental issues?
For example, the Buddha started with dukkha — often translated as suffering or dissatisfaction.
Christians often start with original sin and separation from God.
The Forum starts from the premise that our lives are absurd.
To understand this, first consider that we spend much of life simply as machines. Few of our behaviors are consciously chosen. In reality, they are driven by complex chains of stimulus-response conditioning. These lie well below our threshold of awareness.
What’s more, our existence is inauthentic:
We routinely suppress our emotions and hide what we truly think and feel.
We live in constant fear of looking bad in front of other people and then pretend that we aren’t afraid.
Since we so seldom tell the truth about our experience — even to our intimate partners — our lives are fundamentally based on pretense.
When we encounter people who disagree with us, our first impulse is to dominate them and “win” the debate.
We work hard to make other people wrong and make ourselves right.
This comes at the cost of learning something new and seeing the world through fresh eyes.
In addition, we live with an absence of integrity. We make agreements and consistently fail to keep them. We settle for coming up with reasons, rationalizations, and excuses for our failures rather than producing results.
Fortunately, the Forum doesn’t stop there. Even with the most dire diagnosis, there comes a treatment.
Getting to nothing
One purpose of the Landmark Forum is to erase your identity and reduce you to nothing.
Seriously.
Consider that the core elements of our identity are rackets, strong suits, and stories.
A racket is a circumstance that you complain about — even though you receive a payoff from it.
Example: A man’s mother sends him money every week, even though he’s 40 years old. Every chance he gets, he gripes that she’s overprotective. But if his mother ever stopped sending the money, he’d complain about that.
Strong suits are decisions we make at certain crucial points in our development. These decisions are random, hasty, and irrational. Yet they can shape our lives for decades to come.
According to the Forum, there are three pivotal decisions in life:
During childhood, you experienced a time when you weren’t good enough, and you decided to be…. (fill in the blank)
During adolescence, you experienced a time when you didn’t belong, and you decided to be…. (fill in the blank)
As a young adult, you experienced a time when you realized you were on your own, and you decided to be…. (fill in the blank)
During my own adolescence, for example, I didn’t belong to a group of peers that I admired. So I decided to become a straight-A student and master the guitar. These became coping mechanisms and ways to win social approval — my personal strong suits.
One entire day of the Forum was devoted to investigating rackets and strong suits. We learned to see them as arbitrary interpretations of past events — that is, as stories.
This links to another purpose of the Forum — systematically separating our stories from the facts about what actually happened to us.
Example: Your mother-in-law asks you to not call her “mother.” You make up a story about this: She doesn’t love me. From then on, your behavior around your mother-in-law is based on this story. You pretend that your story is what actually happened.
It’s also possible that your mother-in-law never rejected you. Maybe she truly loves you — and just wants to be called by her first name.
I found that even a momentary glimpse into the emptiness and meaninglessness of my stories was enough to shift my perspective on just about everything.
This, in fact, is exactly what happened to me at 5 pm on the second day of the Forum: Seeing through my stories, I suddenly felt reduced to nothingness.
This must be, I thought, what Buddhists call anatta, or not-self. It was terrifying, beautiful, and holy.
As our Forum leader said: Life is empty and meaningless. And this insight in turn is also empty and meaningless.
Creating from nothing
Stated so baldly, “getting to nothing” might sound strange or even cruel.
Actually, it’s liberating.
From a state of nothingness, anything is possible. Once you’re reduced to a psychological blank slate, you are free to reinvent yourself.
You can declare new possibilities — new aspirations, new outcomes — and align your moment-to-moment behaviors with them. (This alignment is the essence of integrity.)
From this point of view, speaking is pure creation. We call new possibilities into being solely through the power of our word — by putting them into words. These possibilities can transcend stories, rackets, and strong suits, which are part of the past that no longer binds us.
Four implications for daily life
Any system for personal transformation comes with inherent dangers. One is workshop syndrome — basking in the warm afterglow of a powerful training only to silently sink back into our old behaviors after memories the event fade.
To avoid this fate, I remember the following.
First is to notice my desire to “be right rather than be in relationship.” After observing this tendency, I can remind myself to let it go. I can relax, take it easy, and open up to what other people have to say — no matter what that is. And I can free myself from the need to dispute it and force people to agree with me.
A second implication is to practice compassion. I see now that we run rackets not because we’re evil or stupid but because we’re all thrown into this mysterious universe without a clue to its meaning.
We’ve all felt existential fear. And we all did whatever seemed necessary to survive at the moment — even if it compromised our self-expression, our relationships, and our basic aliveness.
I remember all those people who, like me, stood up in front of the room during the Landmark Forum and shared their stories. They were all like me, really — just running different rackets and developing different strong suits. The content of those rackets and strong suits doesn’t matter so much the process of creating them.
Like the Buddha said, we all suffer. Remembering this helps to temper my anger and practice a little more patience.
Third is live with integrity. My practice is to give my word consciously — and then and keep it rigorously.
Another way of saying this: Be as dependable as gravity. Gravity never stops working. It just is. As long as you live on planet Earth, you can count on gravity, absolutely.
The world works when people keep their word with the same consistency. When people don’t keep their agreements — and then go on to tell stories about it — all hell breaks loose.
The key is to recognize when you are making an agreement. I’ve seen few people who do this. They make statements such as these with zero intention of following through, such as:
We should get together soon.
Let’s do this again.
I’ll get back to next week.
You are hereby warned: If I ever say that I’ll send you an email next week, then you can count on getting one.
Finally, my intention is to live without beliefs.
I find that life works much better when I don’t believe in anything. This makes sense when you remember that belief is an attachment to an idea. And when you are attached to an idea, Werner Erhard said, your foot gets nailed to the floor. You stop thinking about your belief. You refuse to examine the alternatives.
Do you want to index all the places in your life where you’ve stopped learning? Just make a list of your beliefs.
In a nutshell
Graduates of est — a precursor to the Landmark Forum — sometimes received a collection of aphorisms after completing the training. One of them was:
One creates from nothing. If you try to create from something you’re just changing something. So in order to create something you first have to be able to create nothing.
That’s it. That’s what I got from the Landmark Forum.
Also see: A Review and Summary of the Landmark Forum.
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I attended the Landmark program decades ago when I was around 18. I recall being horrified and overwhelmed by the stories shared by others (and refused to look at my own!) I was also kinda put off by the relentless marketing of Landmark. Your fantastic summary makes me feel like I missed a good opportunity.